Art Central 2015

The packed month of March has just passed and I’m getting a little breather myself during this long holiday! I’m finally getting round to talking about Art Central, the newest art fair that debuted in Hong Kong.

It was a 3-day affair from 14-16 March and I went on the second day. I didn’t know this earlier but Sundays are crazily packed days for art fairs (Art Basel sold out their online tickets for Sunday!). It was held in a giant tent on the Central Harbourfront Event Space, a newly built space with a gorgeous park around it, with gray carpeted floors and wooden planks beneath. I’m not sure if anyone else noticed, but if you stepped a little too hard and a little too near to an art piece on one of those display blocks, the art piece would wobble just slightly!!

Art Central was split into two sections: Central and Rise. Central features established galleries from Asia and beyond, while Rise features up-and-coming galleries representing emerging artists. Overall, there was a strong focus on Asian galleries with works mostly being made within these few years. Many pictures ahead and my full review of Art Central below!

Simone Rosenbauer, Like Ice In Sunshine #13; Like Ice In The Sunshine #2; Like Ice In The Sunshine #10; Like Ice In Sunshine #1 (clockwise from top left), 2014, fine art pigment print, .M Contemporary

Li Hongbo, Wood – Pier, 2014, paper, Contemporary by Angela Li

Li Hongbo, Bust of a Boy, 2013, paper, Contemporary by Angela Li

Li Hongbo’s movable paper works were a huge hit with the crowd, especially when a staff member pulled the Bust of a Boy upwards for a fun show. Even when I saw it up close, it was almost impossible to tell it was made of many layers of stacked paper.

Lü Nan, On the Road – The Catholic Church in China, 1992-1996, gelatin silver print, series of 60 photos, Hive Center for Contemporary Art

This semester, I’ve been taking a class on 19th century modern European art that I’m having the best time with. I learnt about Gustave Courbet and Jean-François Millet who were two influential French artists of the Realist movement. This might be a long stretch but Lü Nan’s The Four Seasons – Everyday Life of Tibet Peasants instantly made me think of Millet’s The Gleaners (1857) and the photograph beside it, On the Road – The Catholic Church in China gave me Courbet’s A Burial at Ornans(1849-50)vibes. Could Lü Nan have taken inspiration from these artists?

This was probably the oldest work I saw at Art Central, haha! I really like the explosion of colors and the materiality of the paint – the way you can see how the oil paint has been applied and twisted around the canvas.

A suit jacket, dress shirt and tie entirely made up of Ming period shards! I found it ridiculously amusing. I’d worried that valuable Ming period vases/pots/other forms of Chinese material culture were intentionally broken to form these shards, but my Chinese friend told me that there are many of these shards left in China. Great way for recycling artistic materials!

This is an interesting one. Each photo has a year printed in red across it starting from 1966 on the top left photo to 2014 on the bottom right photo. Every photo also has ‘5.16’ “written” repeatedly on the photo, a small detail easy to miss. And most interesting of all, every photo features Mao Zedong or something associated with him.

I’ll say the artwork is referencing to the Cultural Revolution, which was launched on May 16th 1966 and ended in 1976 with Mao’s death. The way the photos continue up till 2014 is left up to your interpretation.

I’m a new fan of Hiroshi Senju! He paints in the Japanese nihonga style (I explained this earlier as often making use of a creamy wash to create an atmospheric effect) but his contemporary take on it is very unique to his work. I love how he retains that atmospheric feeling in his works.

I’d previously seen WIlliam Klein’s three works pictured above on Artsy and it was so nice to see them for myself in real life! I would have preferred if the photographs didn’t have those neon color borders though. Dorothy blowing light smoke rings, Paris was a great discovery and I just love it. Polished and whimsical at the same time.

I was very taken with Chi Chien’s works, especially with A Form. There is a nice serenity to Chi Chien’s series of works, yet those planes look like war planes, so I feel there is an underlying edge to the narrative of his works.

Opera Gallery’s booth was like this space of Zen in the middle of Art Central’s tent! Ran Hwang’s Healing Blossoms was a popular piece among fair-goers, and rightfully so, it’s so beautiful. Bahk Seong-hi’s An Aggregation is also a stunner. I love the atmospheric feel of this piece, and the shadows cast by the charcoal bits feel like they’re part of the artwork itself.

This one caught my eye immediately because it outlines Laocoön, a sculpture from the ancient Greco-Roman Classical period. For those interested, Laocoön is the guy who warned the Troyans not to accept the wooden horse left by the Greeks; it’s that story behind the ‘Trojan horse.’ The Greek goddess Athena and god Poseidon favored the Greeks and sent sea-serpents to kill innocent Laocoön and his two sons, and this scene is depicted in Laocoön and Lineament (Laocoon).

I’m not sure if Simon Roberts and Nadav Kander work together or anything like that, but I found their photographs both intriguing and strange in similar ways. It was as if I could recognize where the photographs were taken, yet at the same time, the scenes look constructed and a little fake. Both artists put a place to their photographs, but again, could they just be an illusionistic idea of the places they were depicting?

Flowers Gallery had a great selection of works, and I can safely say that Patrick Hughes’s works were the most photographed at Art Central! He creates these pieces that look flat when you look at them straight on, but they seem to move along with you as you move to see it from a different angle. That’s when you realize that there are panels sticking out from the frame with different images on different sides, as you can see with Fondation Beyeler.

I really like this one! Two very separate images placed together that somehow works. amanasalto dedicated its entire booth to Nobuyoshi Araki’s works, all of which plays with the juxtaposition of black and white images. Unfortunately, only Love on the Left Eye #01 worked for me. The right image is actually a ghostly photograph of people crossing the road, but a bit of Art Central was reflected in the photo frame!

It was nice to see some works of Damien Hirst’s, a well-known contemporary artist, at Art Central. I’m not a fan of Hirst because I find his works too provocative or sometimes scary for me, but he fits right in with Art Central’s aesthetic.

I’m not sure how to phrase this but Baden Pailthorpe’s MQ-9 Reaper felt kind of sci-fi-ish and otherworldly. There’s a long part when the camera pans around an airplane hovering in front of a container home with a man standing there practicing boxing moves. Again, it was both intriguing and strange at the same time.

There were five large-scale installations Art Central categorized as Projects, and here are three that I particularly took notice of.

Stella Zhang, 0-Viewpoint-6-2, 2010, mixed media, Galerie du Monde

Lan Zhenghui, re-thINK, 2014, Ethan Cohen New York

Li Hui, Bridge, 2006, stainless steel, PARKVIEW ART Hong Kong

I hope this has given you a sense of how Art Central was! While looking at the pictures again, I realized that half of the artworks were in black and white, and the other half generally rendered in bright neon colors. I would have liked more variety overall, in medium and especially in style.

Before going to the fair, I’d read a Huffington Post review that called it “irreverent.” I have to agree – I felt that Art Central showcased the edgier side of art, with many artworks that were eye-catching but at times, provocative and even controversial. While I appreciated the range of works shown at Art Central, this style of art is not really my kind of thing so I would not be the best person to comment on that.

Of course, this has only been Art Central’s first year, and we have to see in the next year if they’ll be establishing this aesthetic farther. Art Central has definitely been successful in differentiating itself apart from Art Basel, Hong Kong’s biggest art fair, and offers a range of artworks that some would feel right at home with.

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I'm Ellice Wu, an art history graduate going places to see art in Singapore. Finding art in the everyday, whether that’s in a great art exhibition or a gorgeous cityscape, Wording Art is a space to put pen to paper on scenes and images that I see and love.

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